Conventional damascene or dual-damascene electroplating of large structures (e.g. pads, conductive lines, vias in the upper metallization levels, in redistribution layers on top of passivation or in fan-in and fan-out wafer level packaging concepts) may suffer from a thick overburden of the plated metal on planar surfaces outside of the damascene feature. This heavy metal overburden leads to long plating times and especially to extremely long chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) or etching times to remove and planarize the metal overburden on the planar surfaces. These long CMP or etching times may make the process very expensive and unfavorable for volume manufacturing.